The Long View on Linux, Part 2

N.B. What follows is part two
of "The Long View on Linux", a conversation between Doc Searls and
Phil Hughes. For part one, go
here.Doc: I remember
when the Net first became obvious to business, right after Netscape
released the next incarnation of Mosaic. Nobody knew what to do
with it, because no company owned it. The thing was as free and
open as air. Now, it seems like every business on earth has .com
after their name, and the Net has utterly changed the context of
their work. Are we seeing the same thing happening with Linux? It
seems to me that the Net and Linux are two aspects of the same
thing: a new world that works for three reasons. 1) nobody owns it,
2) everybody can use it, and 3) anybody can improve on it. This
turns out to be great for business -- as long as the business
doesn't try to throttle this public goose that lays golden
eggs.Phil: There is certainly a
similar evolution. That is, Linux was ignored by many for a long
time, even though it really was viable. A few years ago, SCO did a
FAX SPAM about how you could get a $50 trade-in on your Linux
distribution to "upgrade" to SCO UNIX. Well, anyone using Linux at
the time was aware that Linux was a better product than SCO UNIX.
It's pretty obvious this effort didn't work, as we can tell by
SCO's market share.The one thing that really has surprised me is there aren't
any companies that decided to seriously bundle their product with
Linux. Six years ago, I was talking to a company that had
cross-development software. I suggested they make a Linux port of
their product, and then just sell a complete package -- Linux
itself, plus their product on a CD. It is unlikely that someone is
going to use the same computer for office tasks and software
development, so it wouldn't matter if the OS on this system was
different from everything else.I talked to the engineers and the marketing people about
this, and they were all excited. I thought it was a sure thing, but
it never happened.Back to your points: yeah, Linux is a tool that can make
money for a lot of different people, because it is open and free.
Many companies have played along very well to help the goose
continue to produce the eggs. The one company I believe got off
track for a while was Red Hat. They seemed to want to make their
name mean Linux. It wasn't that they did not continue to give back
to the Linux community; the problem was their marketing wasn't
showing Red Hat consumers that there was a lot more to the Linux
community than Red Hat. Sorta like Microsoft trying to make people
think that they were the only game in town.At this point, I think the situation has corrected itself.
You see books on SuSE, Caldera, Debian and other flavors of Linux
in the stores. That means the distributions can compete on how well
they fit the needs of each consumer, rather than on a visibility
issue.Is this change for the better? If you believe Linux should
grow in market share, yes. We used to be a bunch of geeks doing
what we want. Today, Linux is business, and to keep it growing, we
need to keep getting more business people on board. It is just that
along the way, there will be various frustrations. The most common
is when a vendor doesn't understand the point of open, and finds a
way to get around licensing such as the GPL.Doc: What I see
here is a deep conflict between very different ways of conceiving
the Net (where Linux plays a fundamental role) as a context for
business. Geeks conceive the Net and open-source OSes like Linux as
environmental. They're growing spaces that nobody owns, everybody
can use and anybody can improve. Business guys, including "new
economy" get-rich-quick dot-com companies, see the Net as territory
to dominate, as a medium for entertainment and advertising, as a
new retail distribution system, or as something else borrowed from
the familiar world of industry. They don't get that Jerry Yang and
Jeff Bezos didn't make the Net. They only took advantage of what
the geeks made for everybody.It seems to me that, the way the geeks see it, the Net and
everything that makes it good is basically a big new world, built
like a UNIX system. It's a brand-new environment that still needs
to be built out, but in a way that should work for everybody and
not just those who, in Walt Whitman's words, are "demented with the
mania of owning things." This is why the two groups are at such
odds over the patent issue. Geeks know in their bones that the
whole idea of software or business methods being ownable is simply
ludicrous.The GPL is hard to talk about, because it is meant to foster
the virtues that produced this paradise. It so happens that it
succeeded by discouraging ownership and encouraging sharing. These
are rather anti-industrial business concepts, but they're not
anti-business. Every smart business since the dawn of civilization
has understood that what makes a market a market is the open public
spaces that surround every business.Phil: No argument here. I
feel that Microsoft tried to fill in all those spaces, which worked
for a while, but all that is changing.Doc: I've found it
very hard to talk rationally about Microsoft inside the Linux
world. Too many distinctions get collapsed. For example, the
literal distinctions between open and closed source get collapsed
with moral distinctions between right and wrong, and with
qualitative distinctions between good and bad software. Eric
Raymond is fond of saying he just likes software that doesn't suck.
But a lot of the world likes closed-source software for which there
are no alternatives, whether that software sucks or not. And most
Microsoft users, on the whole, don't think Office
sucks.Phil: I think two things
happened here. First, for many people, the first word processor
they used was Microsoft Word. They learned it, and see anything
different as something new they have to learn. So, whether it's
sucky or not, they know how to use it. When I was learning vi, I
had been using ned, a screen-oriented editor on UNIX. ned wasn't
available for the new computer SSC had bought. I hated vi and loved
ned. What happened, however, was in about two weeks, while I still
hated vi, I realized I was editing faster than had ever been
possible with ned.The second is the charm of the GUI. Microsoft had the "in"
that allowed it to produce the best GUI-based editor, because they
had the inside track on the GUI. For the casual user -- someone who
might write a letter a day -- Word was adequate, and easier to
remember how to use. Even I can use Word; it's just that I can get
more work done in vi.The person I started SSC with, Irene Pasternack, left to "get
a life" that included raising a family -- something you don't want
to do when you are starting a company. Irene has consulted at
Microsoft for close to 15 years doing tech writing. A year or so
after she went to work for Microsoft, her boss told her that she
did eight times as much work as his other employees and asked if
she had any idea why. She said, "they use Microsoft Word, I use
vi."Doc: I'm not
defending Microsoft here. I'm just trying to get some perspective
on the popularity of its goods and the worldview those goods tend
to teach -- quite aside from the company's obviously nasty hardball
business practices. It's important to get perspective for several
reasons, one of which is what I believe is why Microsoft has peaked
and will soon be re-positioned as a specialty supplier. It's that
Linux and the Net are rapidly forcing the software business to grow
up.The result, I think, will be something much more like the
construction business. Construction is a trillion-dollar-plus
business, and it has no Microsoft. Almost nobody outside the
industry can name the leading construction companies or their
biggest suppliers. That's because the real leaders are the
architects, builders, contractors, subcontractors and volunteers
who do the real work, just like we see in open-source
software.One reason construction comes to mind is that we make liberal
use of construction and real-estate language in the software
business. We architect, design, develop and build with software. On
the Web, we build sites. Those sites have locations. I don't think
this is just coincidental; I think these metaphors come easily
because the practices are similar. Not identical, but similar
enough to give us a model for the way the software business really
ought to be. It is interesting to note that the construction
business is about as open source as a business can get, and nobody
is any the worse for it. I mean, there are no secrets to making
nails or two-by-fours.A friend of mine used to program for a familiar dot-com
company that runs on Windows NT. He said he constantly had to deal
with memory leaks in that OS, and added, "we're putting up 60-story
buildings and we don't know if there's rebar in the concrete." Then
he added, "Actually, we know there isn't rebar in the concrete, and
we're going ahead anyway, knowing we just have to fix problems
constantly."Open-source software doesn't put geeks out of business; it
just gives them more room to do their
business. And gradually, Linux is proving that. Which is why I
think that in five or ten years, the software and construction
businesses will look very similar, with many more builders,
architects and designers. Plus many more suppliers. The main
difference will be that no one pre-fab
supplier will control the business any more.Phil: The UNIX community
grew up as computer capabilities grew up. The 30-year history of
UNIX means there were people making those buildings without
foundations, because there wasn't any room for the foundation. But
they recognized the problem, and when room became available, they
added as much foundation as would fit. Thus, the best possible
building was produced at each step along the way, and we built a
work force of people who understood how to grow with industry
changes.On the other hand, the MS community knew the foundation was
missing and there was nothing they could do about it, so they
realized the whole building was disposable. Of course, being
disposable means you can sell the new product next year. I think I
am beginning to realize that the mess being created was not a plot
-- just circumstance.Doc: You've
probably watched the climbing Linux adoption curve closer than
anybody. Why is Linux finding universal adoption where other free
UNIXes (such as the BSDs) did not?Phil: As much as Richard
Stallman and others would like to credit this adoption with the
difference between the GPL and the other software licenses, I just
don't think it is the case. Linux got out there, and it worked.
While the various BSD camps were fighting over which was the one
true BSD, people were using Linux and seeing that it was a
solution.Once Linux had the inertia, and Linux
Journal certainly helped build that inertia, Linux would
continue to roll along. I also have to give a lot of credit to
Linus' management skills. Getting hundreds, possibly thousands, of
programmers around the world to all cooperate on the development
was an amazing effort. Getting them all to do it for free was way
beyond amazing.Even before I met Linus, I was impressed by his maturity and
sobriety. The guy just seemed to have this highly informed and calm
perspective, like a judge. Not your average 20-something dude; not
your average geek, either. Made me wonder what would have happened,
say, if Bill Joy had stayed with Berkeley UNIX. Instead, Bill is
doing fun stuff, but it's all stuff that's owned by Sun. Java.
Gini. Solaris. Sun is a good company, but in their own way, they're
as closed as Microsoft.Linus has introduced a new model to the computer industry.
Or, maybe I should say that Richard Stallman proposed a new model,
and Linus was the right man to successfully implement it. In any
case, it has worked, and that may help convince companies such as
Sun to at least move in the direction of more openness.Doc: When did you
meet Linus?Phil: I first met Linus in
1994. It was at a Linux-related party in suburban Washington, DC.
When I got there, Linus was there along with a few others. They
were talking about some technical Linux-related issues. What I saw
was a person who could participate in the conversation, rather than
act as the boss. At this point, I understood why Linux was moving
forward so rapidly.Doc: Linux has
spread like a wildfire, and Linux Journal has
grown right along with it. How have both Linux and Linux
Journal changed since both came out at v.1.0? And are you
happy with all those changes?Phil: The short answer is
that today we are both better products. But, more importantly, our
focuses have changed. Linux went from a geek OS to a major
contender in the business and commercial market. As that was
happening, LJ went from being a developer magazine to offering a
lot more that would appeal to the commercial user.Over the years, we have received letters from readers who
credit LJ with convincing their bosses that Linux was real. At
times, I felt LJ was portraying a more professional image than
Linux itself; at other times, I felt it was the other way
around.I can't say I am happy with all the changes, but I also
realize they needed to happen. While it used to be more fun to play
with Linux than to publish a magazine, I also realize that for
Linux to move forward, it is necessary for it to become more
commercial. We would not be seeing drivers for all the new hardware
if we didn't have the kind of growth we have.Doc: In the last
year, Linux has become a very hot topic. It seems to me this was
for two reasons. One was the popularity of the OS itself. The other
was the popularity of new Linux companies in the stock market.
These are two very separate concerns that were covered by the
mainstream press as if they were one -- at least while Linux stocks
were hot. Now we're seeing the topics start to separate a bit, now
that dot-coms of all kinds (including Linux stocks) are dropping
from the sky like a plague of frogs. Linux stocks were especially
hard hit. It hardly seems fair.Phil: The growth in the
popularity of the OS has been amazing. Here, I think the US
Department of Justice and Microsoft both get some credit. The DOJ
anti-trust suit brought the concept of an operating system into the
minds of much of the public. Prior to the DOJ action, most people
only understood "computer" and "program" together, where "program"
was commonly spelled Microsoft Word. They bought a computer, and
added Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office in order to make it do
things. That's all very different today.The Microsoft credit has to do with NT/Windows 2000. A lot of
companies were betting on NT or Windows 2000 offering the server
side of their computing. The harder people look at these products
now, the more they seem to realize that there are alternatives such
as Linux, and quite bluntly, Linux has proven to be a better
choice.Windows 2000 is finally out there, but people are sick of
waiting. If Windows 2000 works, fine. But if not, they are likely
to pick an alternative, and Linux seems to be at the top of that
list.Doc: Here
at Linux Journal we use Debian, which is the
largest noncommercial distribution. Are we doing it for agnostic
reasons (not wanting to favor any particular advertiser), because
it's better, or both?Phil: Note that we used to
use Slackware. I like the idea that Debian seemed to be the best
fit for us, because we can then be agnostic, but we chose it mostly
because it was a better solution. Debian has always had a good
dependency system, plus it was designed so you could upgrade
without a reboot. While Debian development might fall behind the
commercial distributions, I am not a fan of upgrades without a
reason, so it has tended to keep up with our needs.Doc: What do you
run personally?Phil: On my personal
systems, I run a whole bunch of different distributions for various
reasons. For example, I have SuSE on one laptop and Caldera on
another.Doc: Richard
Stallman tells me he'd like to see a clearer differentiation
between GNU Linux and the commercial forms of Linux. Can this
happen? Should it? Is there that much of a difference in kind
between the various distros?Phil: Linux, the kernel and
hundreds of utility programs are virtually the same in all the
distributions. Sure, SuSE will release a new distribution this week
with a newer kernel than Red Hat. But next week, Caldera will be
ahead, and so on. But they are mostly the same.What they add to all this GPLed software is a combination of
additional programs, such as an evaluation copy of some commercial
software, and an installation method. All the distributions I have
seen differentiate between GPLed software and commercial software,
so I don't see this as a serious issue. As for the installation
methods, most distributions have GPLed this code as well.Doc: Let's talk
about Linux on the desktop. When I first saw Linux running an
Office suite on a GUI desktop, well over a year ago, I expected
great things to happen fast. Yet today, there isn't a single
non-proprietary desktop application suite to compete with Microsoft
Office, and I don't see any on the horizon. Enterprise-customer
types tell me Linux won't make it on the desktop until it has a
truly competitive (and compatible) office suite. What will break
the logjam here?Phil: StarOffice, while not
open source, is free and is forcing the issue of compatibility.
Sun, the owner of StarOffice, needs a generic and compatible office
suite in order to restrict Microsoft's ability to rewrite the
standard every year or two. If StarOffice is successful in
preventing the standards re-write, then I expect other packages
will appear. The good news is that StarOffice is available for MS
Windows, and as I understand it, E-machines is shipping it on their
boxes. This should help market penetration.Doc: If you see
Sun as the only player with the clout to really compete with
Microsoft in office suites, what do you make of Applix's and
Corel's chances? And do you think it's possible that some group of
open-source developers, KDE for example, will come up with a
practical open-source office suite?Phil: Corel doesn't have a
complete suite yet, and I don't think they will until after the
issue has been forced anyway. Applix has had an office suite out
there for a long time, but I don't think they have the clout
needed. Sun wins on image. Lots of people know that Sun systems are
all over the Internet, and some people even know that Microsoft's
hotmail.com site is running on Sun systems. Maybe it's BSD. In any
case, Scott McNealy is out there picking on Microsoft, and that
helps position Sun as the leader.Doc: Sun really
has nailed down a strong position as the primary big-time
Net-native player. And Scott McNealy is funny as hell. When he was
asked the other day about Microsoft, he said, "Which
one?"Phil: Well, the way I feel
Linux will creep into the office desktop is on a company by company
basis. Take a bank, for example. While there are lots of computers
in banks, they don't do a lot of different tasks. Armed with a word
processor, a spreadsheet and some program to access their
proprietary software running on a server, you could quickly convert
a bank over to Linux desktops. This will happen because of cost
issues.Doc: This is what
lots of people want to see with Linux appliances. Should be
interesting to see how that goes.Phil: Besides cost, the ease
at which you can add things to Linux and the fact that Linux for an
appliance can be made really small are two more pluses in favor of
Linux in this market. As much as BeOS is a great OS, I think it is
going to be hard for Be, Inc. in this market because of
Linux.Doc: Do you give
Be much of a chance in any case? How about if they open source the
OS?Phil: I think they bailed
out of the desktop at the wrong time. For some high-end IAs, they
may have a market, but I don't see them getting any significant
percentage. Qt without X (this is new) makes Linux more viable
here.Doc: Let's talk
about loves & hates. Why do you hate Perl and love Python? Why
do you hate Emacs and love vi? These are often religious issues,
but I'm interested in what makes for wise and forward
choices.Phil: They generally are
religious issues. In the days of less-powerful computers, you could
make the argument that vi is small and Emacs is a pig, but today,
it doesn't matter. I learned vi in 1983. I don't even think about
which keys to hit to do a task -- it is just magic now. I have no
reason to change.A newcomer should try both. Some people, for example, really
can't handle a moded editor like vi. Others see the advantage of
fewer keystrokes. Yes, we have an office full of vi users. but I
expect some places have offices full of Emacs users.Perl vs. Python is, to me, different. Historically, Perl
evolved from UNIX commands such as sed and awk, whereas Python was
designed. Python was designed to be an object-oriented language,
whereas OOP features were tacked on to Perl. If you are an old UNIX
programmer, then Perl may make sense to you; but for a non-UNIX
person, I can't see it.

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